


Five Times Ben Thought About Going Into the Light, and the One Time He Finally Did

by neuronary



Series: friendly bentacles [1]
Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 5+1 Things, Addiction, Ben Hargreeves Needs A Hug, Ben Hargreeves' Tentacles | Bentacles, Canonical Character Death, Death, Gen, Kinda?, Major Character Injury, Mental Health Issues, Resentment, Suicidal Thoughts, and to top it all off, except he's already dead, gratuitous references to george orwell's animal farm
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:22:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25663573
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/neuronary/pseuds/neuronary
Summary: Ben.He doesn’t know how to describe the voices other than comforting. Safe. In that sense, unfamiliar.Ben.A new voice, perfectly recognisable this time.“Klaus?”
Relationships: Allison Hargreeves & Ben Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Diego Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Everyone, Ben Hargreeves & Klaus Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Luther Hargreeves, Ben Hargreeves & Vanya Hargreeves, Number Five | The Boy & Ben Hargreeves
Series: friendly bentacles [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1946155
Comments: 26
Kudos: 237





	Five Times Ben Thought About Going Into the Light, and the One Time He Finally Did

**Author's Note:**

> Okay hi! This is my first foray back into this fandom since the first season came out and I projected way too hard on Five. This time I am projecting way too hard on Ben. I accidentally pulled an all-nighter writing this.
> 
> Quick Disclaimer/Warning thing: This fic isn't super nice to Klaus. I've seen a lot of people in this fandom painting Klaus as an innocent victim who's done nothing wrong (and usually painting another sibling as The Evil One), but I have experience with the Ben side of things. Having a (step-)sibling with addiction issues. It's not fun, and addicts can be really fucking nasty when you're getting between them and their drug. I think Klaus is struggling with a lot, but so are all of his siblings, and I think that, like all of his siblings, he's a real dick for a lot of the show. That's... kind of the plot to be honest.
> 
> If you or a loved one is struggling with addiction, please reach out. People are there to help when you need it.
> 
> [NHS page on drug addiction](https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/healthy-body/drug-addiction-getting-help/)
> 
> I hope you enjoy!

_ Once _

\---

_ Ben. _

_ Ben. _

He doesn’t know how to describe the voices other than comforting. Safe. In that sense, unfamiliar. 

Ben.

A new voice, perfectly recognisable this time.

“Klaus?”

He’s standing in the Gazebo, and it’s snowing but he doesn’t feel cold.

“Where am I?” he asks, because he should feel cold, shouldn’t he?

“You’re back in the land of the living,” his brother says, and Ben doesn’t miss the crack in his voice, notices the way his fingers are shaking while the rest of his body is still. “It’s been a real shitshow since you died,” Klaus says. “Everyone’s a mess.”

_ Ben _ .

“Listen,” he says, and it hurts a little, “I need to go back.”

“What? Why? You just got here!”

_ Ben _ .

Klaus pulls out his flasks and drinks. Ben tries to think of a good way to explain.

“There was a light,” he starts, “and they told me to walk into it.” They didn’t. All they do is call his name, softly, like they’re waiting for him to wake up. He sits, balanced between two ends of a rope, afraid.

“That thing? Pfft.” Klaus waves a hand. “You can do that whenever, don’t worry about it.”

He looks like shit. There are darker circles than usual under his eyes and he’s somehow gotten paler. His fingers are still shaking and the flask is shaking with them but the rest of his body is tense, held still by sheer force of will, probably.

Klaus needs him.

So Ben asks, “Are you sure?” even though he’s already made up his mind, and Klaus pisses in Dad’s gas tank as promised.

And Ben’s okay. Mostly. He has a job to do.

\---

_ Twice _

\---

_ Ben. _

Klaus is stable, at long last, passed out on the hospital bed, and Ben is sitting in the chair next to him, wondering how to get back to the light, when the door bursts open.

Diego stands in the doorway, looking like he’s about to pass out.

“ _ Klaus _ ,” he says, and Ben is in no way emotionally prepared for this shitshow.

The worst part about being a ghost, so far, has been the boredom. Seriously, that should have been in the fine print. The amount of time that Ben has spent staring at skies and walls and ceilings, no one to talk to or even be seen by, while Klaus sleeps off whatever comedown he’s on is ridiculous.

The new worst part might be this.

“Fuck, K-Klaus,” Diego murmurs sitting  _ in _ Ben (easily the second worst part of being a ghost) and grabbing their brother’s hand.

“I’ll find the doctor and get an update,” says the woman that followed Diego to the doorway, who Ben has only just noticed.

Diego nods, giving her a shaky smile, and they must be close because there’s no way Diego would let just anyone see him like this.

Ben looks at Diego, halfway to a breakdown and clutching at Klaus’ deathly pale hand.

_ Ben. _

He looks at Diego’s girlfriend, solid and comforting, a silhouette in the doorway.

He follows the girlfriend - Officer Eudora Patch - out and observes while she sorts everything out. She finds the doctor, gets a quick rundown of his state in layman’s terms, makes sure that no one will disturb Diego while he’s there, and grabs some water on her way back.

If he could, Ben would die for this woman, and he desperately wishes to be able to remind Diego never to let her go.

She leaves again, this time promising to return with food and asking what Klaus’ favourite sweet treat is.

“I… I don’t know,” Diego says, sounding wretched.

“Chocolate donut with sprinkles,” Ben says, even if no one can hear him.

“It’s okay,” Patch says, laying a hand gently on Diego’s shoulder. “He’ll be hungry enough to eat your burnt sprouts when he wakes up.”

It’s an inside joke they both laugh at, albeit guiltily, and Ben is struck by the fact that Diego really left. He’s made a life for himself outside the academy, with a girlfriend and a job and inside jokes. He’s happy, aside from the big Klaus-shaped lump in the bed.

Ben’s pissed, still, angry that despite his multiple warnings, Klaus had pushed his limits far enough to snap and overdosed on fucking horse tranquilisers. Ben wants nothing more in that moment, now that he knows that Klaus is going to pull through, to go back to the voices that had called his name in 2006 and call back. He wants to go, find eternal peace or whatever the fuck, and never look back.

But if he does, someone else will have to deal with Klaus. Someone with a life of their own, someone who needs to eat and sleep and breathe. Diego, probably, because he always cared the most.

Ben watches Patch squeeze Diego’s shoulder and smile as she walks away.

Diego is happy.

Ben ignores the voices that are calling him towards their light.

\---

_ Thrice _

\---

“Klaus,” Ben says. “ _ Klaus _ .”

“What,” his brother whines, barely even a question.

Ben points. At the newsstand hangs a magazine with Allison on the front, holding a baby.

_ Welcome to the World, Claire! _ the cover proclaims in yellow block letters.

Allison has had a baby. Ben has a niece.

He hadn’t even known she was pregnant.

“Well,” Klaus mutters, pulling the magazine down, “would you look at that.”

Ben is looking. Ben is drinking in every detail he can commit to memory about his little baby niece - she’s so  _ small _ \- that he’ll never get to hold. It hits him like a tonne of bricks. He’ll never get her birthday presents, never be the cool uncle that gets her ice cream at the park, never even see Allison again, at the rate Klaus is going.

“Hey,” Klaus says, upbeat all of a sudden, and Ben’s unbeaten heart lifts in his chest, “do you think she’d lend me some money?”

Ben has done his best, for eight years, to be nice, supportive, and non-judgemental.

In that moment, he puts his fist straight through Klaus’ face.

_ Ben. _

He’ll never meet Claire, because even if he is her brother, Allison is gonna be a good mother and good mothers don’t let unstable junkies like Klaus around their kids.

_ Ben _ .

He’ll never hold her, hug her, help her with her homework. He’ll never let her complain about boys to him while her parents take a break. He’ll never be the person she calls when she needs picking from a party her parents don’t know she’s at. He’ll never, ever, get to be the Uncle he didn’t know he wanted to be until now.

_ Ben _ .

Why him? Why did he have to be the one to die and get stuck watching his brother try and fail to replicate his results? Why couldn’t he have been the one haunted by Klaus, visiting his niece and meeting Diego’s girlfriend and Allison’s husband and hell, maybe Vanya’s got someone too. Wouldn’t it have been nice if he’d gotten to meet whoever that was.

_ Ben _ .

Fuck.

“Ben!”

Klaus waves his hands around in front of Ben’s face.

“What the hell, man? You totally zoned out there.”

“It’s fine,” Ben mutters. “Let’s just go.”

\---

_ Fourfold _

\---

Dad’s sending Luther to the moon. Has sent. He’s on his way there, subject to criticism by NASA, the ESA, the CNSA, and INCOSPAR, because it’s ridiculously, unbelievably dangerous to man a moon mission single-handed.

All of this Ben has managed to glean from a few newspapers in rehab because Klaus claims Luther is ‘boring’ when he’s in withdrawal.

Boring or not, Luther is going to die up there, and Ben doesn’t want him to because, unlike his groaning, vomiting brother, he remembers dying.

And it was cold.

_ Ben. _

It will be colder on the moon. There are so many things that could go wrong that Ben has read about, and so many more he hasn’t been able to understand.

_ Ben _ .

Luther will be so cold, and so alone, up there when he dies. Will he be able to find his way home, 239,000 miles away?

_ Ben _ .

Ben was so cold and so very, glaringly alone.

_ Ben. _

But Luther doesn’t have to be.

_ Ben. Ben. Ben. _

He sits there and listens as hard as he can, and he’s close, so very nearly there, when Klaus calls,

“Ben? You remember Sammy?”

He sighs and lets his head drop forward. He doesn’t remember Sammy.

\---

_ Fivefold _

\---

Once again, Ben is angry. Though, this time his anger is illogical in its entirety. He should be happy Klaus wants to get clean, surely. But--

But.

But why is this ‘Dave’ worth getting clean for, when Ben wasn’t? What made Dave so special?

Ben’s mind whispers all these treacherous little thoughts at him, accompanied, as he always in times of crisis, by the faint calls of something safer.

_ Ben _ .

To make matters worse, when Klaus gets back to the house and collapses face first into a sofa, Five is upstairs, stomach torn to shreds, looking every bit the little boy who stubbornly refused to leave Ben alone to spiral after personal training, and asked for recaps on the plot of Animal Farm more times than Ben could count.

_ Ben. _

Ben sits next to Five, tiny and unconscious, with a puncture wound in his side, and selfishly wishes ghosts could cry.

“Hey, Five,” he says, instead. “How are things?”

He gets no response, unsurprisingly, but presses on.

“So, Animal Farm,” he chokes out, through a lump in his throat that hadn’t been there earlier. “The book I’m reading. It’s about, uh, the Russian Revolution. Except they’re all animals. On a farm. Obviously.” He takes a deep breath that he doesn’t need. “You remind me of Snowball, a bit. The other animals chased him away, because he had a lot of new ideas to make their lives better, and the change scared them.”

Five’s brow twitches for a moment, like it might furrow, then relaxes. Ben holds a breath he doesn’t have until he’s certain Five won’t wake up.

_ Ben. _

“The difference,” he explains, “between you and Snowball, is that Snowball doesn’t come back.”

He waits for a reaction that isn’t coming, then continues.

“If this is too much, Five… if you want to be like Snowball, we could--” he wants to cry, feels it burning behind his eyes unable to escape, “I could go, too. We could do it together. I missed you so much, and-- and it might be easier, if you’re not alone, I don’t know. I could help.”

_ And you could help me _ , he doesn’t say, because he’d like to pretend he isn’t being selfish for just a little while longer. He wants his brother back in a way that means he can hug him, and talk to him, and read a passage of Animal Farm again.

Five stirs, eyes cracking open against the sunlight that’s filtering into his room through his invisible brother.

Ben is alone again, and the voices fade away.

\---

_ And Once Again _

\---

“I don’t deserve to live,” Vanya whimpers.

But yes, she does. So Ben talks. For the first time in a long time, he talks to someone who isn’t Klaus, he talks to someone who listens  _ and  _ knows him. He talks about Dad, and about their siblings, and about Vanya. He says “You’re not a monster,” because it’s what he always needed to hear. He’s missed her so much.

_ Ben. _

She takes a deep breath, and he knows it’s done, that  _ he’s  _ done. It feels as though a weight has been lifted; his family is safe, and regardless of the present, they will be okay in the future. Their future.

_ Ben _ .

“What’s happening to you?” Vanya sounds scared, and Ben realises that he's floating away, little pieces at a time. “I’m hurting you, aren’t I?”

Ben shakes his head, smiling. The voices are getting… not louder, but closer.

_ Ben. _

“This isn’t your fault,” he assures her. “I’ve been dead for seventeen years. Being a ghost was just… gravy.”

Vanya nods, new tears in her eyes. Ben smiles, because he feels free.

_ Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben... _

“Hey,” he says, reaching out to take her hand again. “At least this time, I get to say goodbye.”

Vanya nods again, still crying, but she’s happier, calmer than he’s seen her in a long time. “I missed you. I love you.”

“Can I ask kind of a weird favour?”

“Anything.”

“Hug me while I go?” he asks. “It’s been a long time--”

And then Vanya’s arms are wrapped around him, and she’s pressed into his chest. She is warm and solid against him and he has been so cold and so lonely for so long that he aches with the contact.

_ Ben. _

“Tell Klaus something for me, would you?” Is his final request, words whispered into Vanya’s ear before he finally lets go.

_ Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben, Ben. _

It’s the Horror, he realises, as he steps through something into somewhere new. The very thing that killed him without meaning to, that was, as it turns out, just as young and afraid as he was. He steps into the light, to the voices of old friends.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some more resources on addiction:
> 
> [Mind Mental Health Charity](https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/addiction-and-dependency/addiction-and-dependency-resources/) (UK)
> 
> [Addictions and Recovery](https://www.addictionsandrecovery.org/addiction-recovery-links.htm) (International I think)
> 
> And some resources on grief:
> 
> [HelpGuide](https://www.helpguide.org/articles/grief/coping-with-grief-and-loss.htm) (International)
> 
> [Mind Mental Health Charity](https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/guides-to-support-and-services/bereavement/about-bereavement/) (UK)
> 
> I hope you enjoyed this fic. Or, more accurately, I hope you didn't enjoy it. If you wanna come yell about season two with me you can find me on [Tumblr](https://neuronary.tumblr.com/). Comments and kudos are very much appreciated!
> 
> Have a nice day!


End file.
